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agon
between male
Wole Soyinka
protagonists and antagonists. The following unvarnished assertion of
male superiority by Elesin Oba in the final scene of
Death and the King’s
Horseman
is extraordinary in its explicitness and though it is the
only
such
baldly male-chauvinist expression in all of Soyinka’s drama, it is nonethe-
less a metonymic pointer to the place of women in general in Soyinka’s
plays:
(
hesitates, then goes to Elesin
): Please, try and understand. Everything my
husband did was for the best.
(
he gives her a long stare, as if trying to understand who she is
): You are the wife
of the District Officer?
: Yes, my name is Jane.
: That is my wife over there. You notice how still and silent she sits? My
business is with your husband.
(
DKH
,
)
It must of course be appreciated that a protagonist does not reflect an
author’s beliefs and world-view; moreover, the normative maleness in
Soyinka’s drama is far more complexly articulated than this instance
of crude expression of male chauvinism in one play. Additionally, in
light of the larger canvas of the historic conflict between colonizer and
colonized in the play, what we have here is the patriarchy of the colonized
confronting that of the colonizers, the project of both colonization and
the nationalist resistance that it engendered being both essentially male-
centered.
More subliminally, normative maleness in Soyinka’s drama is inscribed
by the powerful currents of homosociality by which the most formative
experiences of infancy through young adulthood of individual members
of each sex take place away from intimate contact with members of the
other sex. In Soyinka’s dramas, this takes the form of the relative absence
and marginalization of women in the main action of most plays in his
dramatic corpus. Indeed much of the energy and ´elan of many of the
playwright’s most memorable plays derive from this factor. Such male
homosocial bonding is at the heart of the energy and appeal of plays
such as
The Road
and
From Zia with Love
, neither of which has a single
female character.
The essential point in the foregoing observations on male-centeredness
in Soyinka’s plays is the point that what he knows best, what he writes
most powerfully about is the world of men – in play and in turmoil.
When one or two female presences crash that world, like Segi in
Kongi’s
Harvest
and Iya Agba and Iya Mate in
Madmen and Specialists
, it is mostly as
The “drama of existence”: sources and scope
over-symbolized essences representing the nurturing and healing powers
of nature, lacking in the vigor, realism and complex contradictoriness
of Soyinka’s male characters. Soyinka has staunchly defended himself
against feminist critiques of his work on this and other relevant issues; in
the following discussion with a scholarly female interlocutor, he invokes
something close to biological determinism as his ultimate defensive reac-
tion, adding that only women writers can write truthfully and powerfully
about women:
: I have some difficulty in coming to terms with your women characters
who seem to combine the bitch and the Madonna. I think your depiction
of women is unrealistic.
: Well, that is my attitude to women. Their form, their being, and the
fact that they, unlike men, reproduce, cause them to become fused in my
mind with Nature in a way that men are not and can never be. I am aware of
criticism, especially feminist criticism which has been getting rabid among
one or two individuals. There is no compromise for me on this subject. A
woman’s shape, a woman’s reproductive capacity which is unique to the
female sex just sets her apart from men. It does not mean that women are
not equal to men intellectually, in capacities and so forth. But the figure of
a woman, the biology of a woman – for me Nature is biology, obviously –
just separates her; and I can never look at a woman in the same way as
I can look at a man and when I reflect her in my writings she occupies
that position. But you’ll admit that there are exceptions. The Secretary,
Dehinwa, in
The Interpreters
is obviously an exception because she was not
treated as a symbol but as a member of the new generation.
: Yes, but I wish your women characters were a little more well-realized.
: But that’s the role of women. It is the women who must realize
themselves in their writings. I can’t enter into the mind and the body of a
woman. No, let women write about themselves. Why should they ask me
to do that?
(David,
)
The aesthetic, technical ramifications of Soyinka’s admission of the
deeply gendered nature of normative maleness in the embodiment of his
characters are far more portentous for a dramatist than for a writer of
fiction since, in a dramatic work intended for stage production, bodily
experience is all. This is why, in terms of dramaturgy and the aesthetics
of performance, Soyinka is at his weakest when excess of symbolism over
referents combines with idealization to more or less efface the “integrity”
of bodily experience. This is bad enough when it applies to male char-
acters as with Forest Head in
A Dance of the Forests
and three of the four
eponymous “giants” of
A Play of Giants
, Kasko, Gunema and Tuboum,
Wole Soyinka
all of whose flatness and one-dimensionality derive from the extreme
idealization of their construction as central protagonists in their respec-
tive dramaturgic universes. But when idealization attaches to women
characters in Soyinka’s drama, or even to a specific male-female rela-
tionship, the result is a veritable aesthetic collapse. One of the worst
dramaturgic solecisms in Soyinka’s drama that is traceable to this prob-
lem is the scene between Daodu and Segi in the concluding section of
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